


parry, parry, strike

by AlchemyAlice



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29942112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: “Oh? What are you, their king?” the Senator says sarcastically, and then freezes at the same time Din does.“...No,” Din says. He does not sound convincing.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 123
Kudos: 853





	parry, parry, strike

**Author's Note:**

> *slaps roof of fic* this baby can fit so many tropes and plotholes in it!
> 
> I have seen the original trilogy, the first prequel, and I choose to pretend the second and third sequel don't exist. I have stripped canon for parts and ignored everything else. This is the way.

He goes to Ahsoka first, because he figures they have a rapport, and also she’s the only other person he knows with a laser sword, other than _him._

It takes him a week to track her down, borrowing a ship from Cara, and then from Fennec, and when he does, she looks him up and down and says, “Grogu found someone?”

As he has every day since the Imperial cruiser, he swallows down the void inside of him and says, “A Jedi.”

She raises an eyebrow. “That much I figured. This Jedi have a name?”

“He didn’t give one.”

“‘He’,” she repeats, chewing it over. “Huh.”

“Would you know him?”

“Not necessarily. We’re not like Mandalorians, we don’t have a network.”

Doubt creeps in, quick on the heels of the daily, grinding loss. Ahsoka clearly senses it, and purses her lips. “It wasn’t always like that,” she amends. “We’re not...we don’t want to be this way. It’s just what happened, after the Purge. I’m glad he found someone, though.”

Din thinks about the Armorer, the way the Purge had necessitated enclaves of safety among the Mandalorians after the devastation. He thinks maybe the Jedi should have tried harder to hold together. But what does he know?

“You’re not here about him, though,” Ahsoka assesses. “What can I help with?”

Din had been rehearsing this on the way through hyperspace, and yet still he finds himself searching for words. He tilts his head away, trying to make a start of it, and failing several times before reaching for the Darksaber at his belt and unhooking it. “I, uh...this came into my possession?”

Ahsoka’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a spike in the air that feels a little like the beginning of a lightning storm. “Came into your possession how?”

“Took it off of Moff Gideon in a fight.”

“Moff…” She finally inhales. “You’d better start from the beginning.”

He’s very much not inclined to do that. “Can you teach me how to use it?” 

“Do you want me to?” she shoots back, and the infinitesimal hesitation Din doesn’t quite manage to override has her exhaling in a resigned huff. “You have to want it. Lightsabers aren’t fully physical things, they’re like... sinkholes, in the Force. You have to pour something in to get anything out.”

Din thought about that for a second, and then said, “Can you teach me how to do that?”

“You…” She drifted off, and grimaced before finally shaking her head. “You’re not a Jedi. I don’t know how to teach a Mandalorian. I’m sorry. Maybe Grogu’s Jedi can help.” She tilts her head. “But no matter who offers, you’re not going to get anywhere unless you want to. So whatever hangup it is that’s keeping you from accepting it as your own, you’d better get over that first.”

“...Okay.” That’s probably not going to happen any time soon. He clips the Darksaber to the least accessible part of his belt, and tries not to think about it.

He drifts for a while after that. Works enough jobs to buy a skeletal but mostly-functional ship that had been made just as the Empire was ramping up, so despite there technically being a record of it and tracking signatures on it, they’re easy enough to dislodge and overwrite in the course of refurb. That’ll probably piss off the next round of New Republic scouts he encounters, but he can’t bring himself to care. 

He wears his helmet. He doesn’t know how not to, and he hasn’t yet worked up the courage to seek out the Armorer to ask about the extent of his transgression, so.

Another couple of quick jobs, and he’s able to kit out a decent berth in the hold and is halfway to putting a hammock up in the overhead rafter when he remembers he doesn’t need it. 

He sits for a while staring at the canvas in his hands. Dust motes drift around him, at times in strange, caressing swirls, almost in the shape of tender hands, and he doesn’t see them at all.

Four months in, Greef sticks him with a New Republic-adjacent gig because apparently Din’s reputation is just respectable enough to meet the client’s expectations, despite the fact that said client is some muck-a-muck from the Core, and shouldn’t be dirtying their hands with a hunter at all. 

“Do you want me arrested?” Din asks, sitting back in the booth at the cantina in Nevarro. “Because this is how I get arrested.”

“Standard immunity provision,” Greef says, unfazed. “You’ll get a puck and you’ll get a Senatorial token. Flash that, and anyone asking will let you pass.”

“And anyone not associated with the New Republic is going to think I’m a hot target.”

“That any worse than having the New Republic on your tail instead?”

“Yeah,” Din says, flat. “The New Republic at least has to pretend to be civil and not murder me on sight.”

“Are you taking this job or not?” Greef asks, losing patience. “You’re to pick up the target on Malastare and bring it to an off-planet waystation orbiting Hosnian Prime. The client assures me that you won’t find any trouble, and I’m inclined to take their word for it, considering the money they’re offering. It should be a milk run.”

Din’s new ride needs a replacement power converter and its scrubbers are on their last legs. “I’m taking it.”

For at least the first half of the job, Din doesn’t need the Senate token at all; he lands on Malastare without incident, and the puck shows a Twi’lek merchant in the main trading city that’s so easy to find by tracker it’s suspicious. Din is thirty seconds away from calling it an elaborate trap and bailing before the Twi’lek spots him, and instead of running away she raises her eyebrows, and waves him into the back of her shop. 

“Bounty?” she asks, as soon as he was inside.

“Uh, yours, yeah,” Din nods, one hand on his blaster. 

“Would you mind if I had a look at the puck?”

Feeling more out of his depth by the minute (a now too-familiar feeling), Din hands it over. The Twi’lek activates it, studies her own holo for a brief moment, and nods. “You’re just in time.”

“For what, exactly?” Din asks with mixed dread and resignation.

She flips the puck over, spins a dial in the base that shouldn’t exist, and reactivates it. This time, no holo of her appears; instead, a blank box with a passcode query flashes in place over the puck. She enters a four-letter code, and the holo goes altogether dark. 

“The hell,” Din says.

“I have intelligence for the Senator,” the Twi’lek explains, reaching inside her coat for a small data drive that she slips into a thin receiver on the puck. “Can you get it to her?”

“I guess it’s...the job?” Din hears himself saying. _The Senator?_ “But I…”

“You need a bounty as a diversion,” the Twi’lek says. “Don’t worry about it. My daughter wants to make a go of it at the Core. She’s willing to be frozen in carbonite for the duration, and the Senator will take care of the rest.”

“You realize there are health risks—”

“She has decided,” the Twi’lek interrupts, implacable. “And I won't stand in her way. Will you take her?”

“Kriff.”

The daughter’s name is Na’vena. She boards Din’s ship with a haunting sort of reserve, and when Din offers to just keep her in cuffs and not hold her in carbonite, she shakes her head. 

“I’m too different-looking from Mama for you to get away with it, and anyway, I’d like the experience. I’m going to be an actress,” she declares.

“It could blind you. Give you nerve damage.”

“I have a very strong constitution.”

_“Kriff.”_

He freezes her. It’s the most unsettling job he’s done since the kid. 

The kid. 

He breathes in deep, lets it out slow.

He’s gotta get to Hosnian Prime, of all places. He sets a course and tries not to sweat too much as they drop into, and then out of, hyperspace. 

The Senator is...well, he has no idea. She shows up robed in black at the waystation, a couple of her guards take the Twi’lek off his hands, and then Din is ushered into a small office off to the side of the hangar, where the Senator sits down and holds out a hand. "The puck?"

Din hands it over. She enters the passcode unerringly, and retrieves the data drive with very little fanfare. “That kid gonna be okay?” he asks her, nodding at the guards outside with the carbonite. 

“She’ll be fine. We’ve got a room at a hostel set up for her on Coruscant, and a stipend to get her going. She took a hell of a risk, and we owe her for it.”

“Good.”

She pauses after pocketing the drive. “Is that pure Beskar?” she asks, pointing at the armor.

“Yes,” Din answers, and readies himself for an insulting offer.

“You’ve got a goddamn target on your back, then,” she says instead. “What the hell are you doing? Why not get a paint job at least?”

Din bristles. "That is not the Way." 

"Oh? I've met a few Mandalorians, I don't know if they'd agree with you."

"I'm not… They're not the same as me."

“Oh? What are you, their king?” the Senator says sarcastically, and then freezes at the same time Din does. 

“...No,” Din says. He does not sound convincing.

“No,” she says, and her tone is even worse. “By the Maker and its balls, tell me you’re not.”

“Uh.”

Her hood tips back as they look at the ceiling of the waystation; Din thinks he gets a glimpse of a pert, pale nose and chin, younger than expected. “This is an interplanetary incident waiting to happen,” she says, distant and resigned. “How…”

“I’m really not,” Din tries to assure her. “I don’t want to be. I just…”

“Just what?”

He swallows. “I have something that makes me king, apparently. That’s all.”

“Oh, _that’s all,_ huh _._ The armor? No.” The Senator is very still for a moment, regarding him. He feels inexplicably flayed open, despite not even being able to see her face. “You carry it with you, though.”

“I—”

“Don’t tell me,” the Senator snaps. “Better that I don’t know.” They pause again, and then they say, “The Force. Whatever you have, it’s strong with the Force.”

“Uh.”

The Senator's hand disappears under the hood of their robes; Din gets the impression that she’s pinching the bridge of her nose. "You know, there was a reason I hired you for this job. You in particular. I have a message for you, from my brother.”

“Your brother?” Din echoes, flummoxed for the fifth time today. 

“Yes. The Jedi?” He freezes. “You are the Mandalorian who gave up your foundling to a Jedi, correct?”

“Yes,” he manages, strangled. He sees the Jedi in his mind’s eye instantly, the recall of his face jarring in its vividness. “That’s...has something happened? Is the kid okay?”

Her shoulders soften. “He’s fine, don’t worry.” After a moment’s consideration, she pulls the hood back, revealing a stunning, heart-shaped face, with fine features and a kind but no-nonsense demeanor. The resemblance between her and the Jedi is subtle, but unmistakable. “Luke was actually hoping you might want to visit. He’s been establishing extra security measures and precautions around the temple, which was why he didn’t get in touch sooner, and not directly. I needed Cham’sara’s information and had a couple of favors owed in the Outer Rim, so I figured we could kill two birds with one stone.” 

Din works saliva into his mouth with difficulty. Before he can say anything, though, she continues.

“If you’re really the king of Mandalore, however, this could be more complicated than we expected.” 

That finally kickstarts his words. “I’d like to see the kid,” he says. “Is that...really allowed?”

“Did he not…? What an idiot. It’s allowed,” the Senator says firmly. “We just have to play this carefully. How many people know that you’ve given your son to a Jedi?”

“Five or six,” Din hazards. “The people who were with me on the cruiser--a couple of my friends, Fett and Shand, Bo-Katan and Reeves.”

She blinked, eyebrows climbing up her forehead. “ _Fett._ Boba Fett, seriously?”

“You know him?”

“I thought he was dead, but yes. That’ll be interesting news to break. And Bo-Katan?” the Senator repeated. “Of House Kryze?”

“You know her?” How the hell does a twenty-something Senator from the Core know all these Rim people?

“Not personally. But she and her House are bound up in the history of Mandalore and the Old Republic, which I know a bit about. Wait, she knows about the child? Does she know that you’re her king?”

Din shifts on his feet, feeling like a recalcitrant student. “I tried to give her the title back. She wouldn’t take it as a matter of honor.”

“That’s even more interesting.” The Senator sighed. “Look, this is...I wasn’t expecting this. I need to make some inquiries, but you should just...go, and see Luke, see your kid. Probably best that you lay low there for a while, if I’m honest. Bad enough that you’ve been running around taking jobs the past few months, it’s a wonder no one’s recognized you.”

“Lay low?” he repeats. “Listen, I have to work—”

She raises a hand to cut him off. “You’ll do it if you don’t want to get involved in the politics of this.”

“I don’t,” Din says, quick enough for her to snort. 

“Fair warning that you and I are both delaying the inevitable.” She grabs a slip of paper off the table and a stylus, and jots a quick note, which she hands to Din. “That’s where Luke and your child are,” she says. “Destroy the paper once you’ve charted your course. I’ve paid you enough to last you for a while without taking on work, am I right?”

“More than,” Din admits.

“Good. Tell Luke he’s an idiot for me.”

 _Luke._ The Jedi’s name is Luke.

The coordinates lead him out to a random moon way out past the Western Reaches which, when he drops out of hyperspace, looks more like a garbage patch than a moon. He spends a while drifting just past its atmosphere, contemplating how the hell he’s going to make a landing when the whole place is surrounded by a cloud of orbiting space junk, when he’s startled by what feels like a solicitous tap on the inside of his prefrontal cortex.

_Mandalorian?_

He jerks back in his seat. “What the hell.”

_Please don’t be alarmed. I understand you spoke to my sister recently; she told me to expect you._

Din exhales very slowly, and tries not to scratch his brain out through his helmet. The presence of it isn’t unpleasant--at all, actually--but the fact of it is deeply unsettling. “Jedi. You’re Luke? Is this...this is a Jedi thing?”

_Yes, I’m sorry I didn’t give my name to you before, we were short on time. Luke Skywalker, if you’re wondering. I’d like to lead you in through the debris--would you allow me to do that?_

“How?”

_I’ll be more or less steering your ship and clearing the way as we go. You can just sit back from the controls, and leave it in neutral._

That...that is a hell of a lot more than just cutting down some Darktroopers. What the hell kind of sorcerer is this Jedi, really?

“Uh. I guess that’s okay.”

_Great! I’ll try to keep it a smooth ride. I assure you, I’m a very good pilot._

A good pilot who _isn’t in the goddamned ship_ , but Din swallows that down. He suspects that the Jedi hears it anyway, because the itch in his brain takes on a shade of amusement. 

_Sit tight. Here we go._

Sure enough, the ship begins to descend. Din grips the armrests and tries not to think too hard about it.

As he enters the ring of floating debris, the ship eerily quiet around him, he realizes that it isn’t just space junk--it’s extremely high-tech space junk, all blown apart and fragmented, and all of a piece. Tiny pieces of control panels and shards of wiring ping off the sides of the ship and sound like hail against the hull. Before it’s nudged out of the way, he’s almost certain he sees a large, warped piece of siding that bears the stamp of Imperial manufacture drift by. 

“What was all this?” he wonders aloud.

_Ah. Well, it’s...it was the Death Star. The second one. The Alliance took it down around here, and Endor’s gravitational field pulled in a bunch of the debris. It creates a decent shield against unwanted company, nowadays._

That sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. 

_You haven’t heard of the Death Star?_

“I think I have? It was some big Imperial destroyer, right?”

_...Close enough. Blowing it up went a long way towards ending the Empire._

“Huh.”

They’ve reached the edge of the atmosphere, and the debris gets smaller and smaller until it’s just bits of burning dust. 

_If I tell you the coordinates, can you land from here?_

“Sure.”

_Great. See you soon._

The Jedi sends the coordinates amidst a wash of impressions of jungle and fog, a waymarker in the form of a small village, and a patch of mossy outcropping. Din grits his teeth, resigns himself to staving off rust, and follows the directions down. 

He touches down in a clearing not much larger than his ship, and when the door opens the humidity hits him like the slap of a wet rag to the face. As he steps down, the Jedi emerges from the trees. 

On his shoulder, steadied by one hand and a tiny fist clutching a tuft of the Jedi’s blond hair, is Grogu. 

Din lets out a breath, and feels the void inside of him fill. “Hey, kid. Grogu, hi.”

Grogu lets go of the Jedi’s hair to make grabby hands, and immediately the Jedi has to grab him around the waist to keep him from tipping onto the ground entirely. 

“Woah! Steady, we’re going, we’re going!” He breaks into an easy, loping jog, and Din refuses to be embarrassed at nearly tripping over himself to meet them. The Jedi doesn’t miss a beat, just tips the kid into his arms as soon as he’s in range and steps back with a huff of laughter. “There we go. All’s right with the world now, huh, buddy?”

“Buir!” Grogu exclaims in agreement, peering up at Din. He’s so solid in Din’s arms, a familiar, warm weight, and Din’s knees go a little wobbly for a second before he gets a hold of himself.

“Hey,” he repeats, feeling his face stretch in a dopey grin that he’s glad the Jedi can’t see. His voice cracks all the same. “Looking good, kid. You being good for the Jedi? Learning new stuff?”

Grogu coos. 

“He’s an excellent student, and the other kids already dote on him,” the Jedi says, hands clasped in front of him, distant air of beneficence back in place. It’s ruined, however, by the cowlick Grogu has left in his hair, and that, if nothing else, lets Din focus on him. He doesn’t look quite the same as Din remembers--he’s shorter than Din, for one, and he seems softer here among the trees, still in black, but just a tunic and trousers now, mud-spattered and looser in fit. The only thing that really feels the same is his gaze, steady and pale, just a touch far-sighted. 

“Thanks for uh...letting me visit, I wasn’t sure....” 

“No, yes, sorry,” Luke says, the illusion of distance falling apart again. He scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’ve done some more reading since I last saw you, I think maybe I gave you the wrong impression. Or rather, did nothing to disabuse you of some established notions.”

“I don’t know about that,” Din says slowly. “I’d never even heard of the Jedi before Grogu.”

“That might be a good thing,” Luke mutters. 

Din has no idea what to make of that, so instead he pulls the silver ball-grip from where he’d kept it in his belt for the past four months. He holds it up for Grogu. “Remember this?” It takes barely half a second before it’s out of his hands and in Grogu’s. “Jeez, you’ve gotten fast.”

The Jedi’s mouth ticks up at one corner, rueful. “In any case, I’m sorry I didn’t reach out sooner. It wasn’t completely without reason; it’s been...tense, since your friends brought Moff Gideon in. Frankly as soon as I saw him on that cruiser, I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.” He turns back towards the forest and gestures for Din to follow. “And after that, I wanted to make sure you were back to business as usual before making any overtures. Spies everywhere, you know?” His gaze flicks down to Din’s hip, so quickly that Din thinks it was a trick of shadow, and then he’s tilting his head towards the path.

“Tense for who?” 

“The Senate. A number of them have been sticking their fingers in their ears when it comes to continued Imperial activity, especially out on the Rim, where they can’t see it. Bringing solid proof of it to the Core shook things up. You have our thanks for that, by the way.”

With a sinking feeling, Din asks, “Are you involved in the Senate? Like your sister?”

“Gods, no. Or at least, not when I can help it,” Luke laughs, looking back over his shoulder. “I’m very bad at politics, and I’m not much of a Core guy. Leia’s used to it, she grew up on Alderaan, but I’m just a hick from Tatooine.”

That’s some relief, but Din still tilts his head. Perhaps family structures for Jedis are more similar to Mandalorians? It seems impolite to ask. “She advised me to lay low here for a while,” he ventures. “Is that okay with you?”

“Perfectly fine. I could use a bit of adult company, to be honest.”

They weave their way along a path Din can only barely discern, hidden as it is in undergrowth and by creeping and hanging vines. The whole place feels vibrantly alive, but not quite peaceful. Looking closely, Din’s pretty sure he sees Stormtrooper helmets and plating up on pikes among the trees. 

“Are we being watched?”

“Probably,” Luke replies. “But they’re friendlies; we go way back. Now that they’ve seen you traveling with me, they’ll know you're a friend, too. Here we are.”

Din doesn’t see anything but trees and more trees. “Uh.”

Luke turns back to him and offers his hand, bare and open. “You’ll see it in a second.”

Din, too bemused to be suspicious, takes his hand.

There’s a temple under the masking shield. A masking shield that apparently Luke had scavenged and then adapted from imperial deflector shields. Mechanical sorcery and actual sorcery--Din’s not sure which one to be more impressed with, if he’s being honest.

They step through, Grogu giggling as the shield passes over them with an electromagnetic jolt, and then the building rises up, greenery-ridden and half-buried, but grand nonetheless. It appears to be built in three sections, a central tower flanked by two smaller piles, with terraced roofs and narrow windows that indicate slabs of stone at least two feet thick on the outsides. Time and jungle conditions has smoothed the rock and covered it in moss, but its architects had meant it to last, and only the very tops of the structure seems to have begun to crumble inwards.

“This place has gotta be ancient,” Din comments. “Does anything even work?”

“More than,” Luke agrees. “And not really. Pre-Galactic Republic, I think. There were a lot of shipwrecks here back in the first ages of space travel, and my guess is a handful of Jedi, or maybe just Force-sensitive beings, ended up here by accident, and decided to stay. They left this, and I discovered it not long after the Empire fell. Seemed as good a place as any to try and rebuild. Go back to something older, more fundamental than the Jedi traditions alone.” His eyes seem to pale even further, go even more distant. “The Force is strong here,” he murmurs, “but untethered.” 

Din has no idea what that means, but he nods anyway. 

“Come and meet everyone,” Luke offers, reverting to normal. “I think you’ll find it surprisingly comfortable.”

‘Everyone’ consists of three students--two young humanoids, Kai and Dara, and unexpectedly, a slightly older Trandoshan named Sarkh--and an astromech droid that everyone seems to treat as a reluctant (and foul-mouthed) nanny. They all congregate on the middle levels of the temple, where they’re away from the moisture of the forest floor but not exposed to the elements where the roof has developed cracks. “Early days yet,” Luke says, with a crooked smile. “And anyway, I’m still developing a curriculum.”

“We’re allowed to be critique constructors,” Dara volunteers.

“Constructive critics,” Luke corrects, lifting an instructive finger. “I will only accept complaints when they are accompanied--”

“--by reasonable solutions,” all three of them chorus with him. Even Grogu babbles along. 

Din, who had been taught with firm love but a firmer hand, stares at them all and for the first time, actually believes that Grogu is where he’s supposed to be. Something hard in the crook of his grief crumbles and gives way. 

Luke looks sharply at him, raising one hand as if to touch him, but then he stops, softening. 

“I’m starving,” Sarkh claims, in a tone of great despair. “Can it be dinner time?”

Luke casts a glance up at the sky, and seems to judge it late enough to nod. “Sure. Mando, you hungry?”

“Starving,” Din echoes with a sense of unreality, and Sarkh pumps his fist into the air in validation.

“So,” Luke starts in the middle of breakfast the next day, before the students have managed to pry themselves out of bed, “Leia tells me that you’re king of the Mandalorians. That’s uh...I can’t say I expected that.”

Din grumbles incoherently. Luke, for all his apparent softness, has taken him off-guard, and there isn’t enough kaf in the galaxy for this conversation. “There’s this sword,” he says. “Whoever wins it in battle is the king. I won it from the Moff. It was an accident.”

“Some accident. And some sword, I might add,” Luke says. His gaze flicks down again to where it’s strapped to Din’s belt. “Awfully lightsaber-shaped, I’d even go so far as to say.”

“It’s called the Darksaber. I don’t want it.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Luke says, over the rim of his kaf mug. 

“You’re telling me.”

“And you have to be bested in a fight in order to pass it along?”

“A fair fight apparently, I can’t just throw it.” 

“Hmm,” Luke says. “You should probably learn how to use it, then.”

“I know how to use a sword.”

“It’s not a sword, it’s a lightsaber.”

“Darksaber.”

“Whatever.” Luke finishes his kaf and stands. “If it’s the same as a sword, then that should be a fun demo for both you and the kids, huh?”

It is a fun demo. The kids cheer a lot, at least. 

Din is going to have bruises for _days._

“Okay,” he wheezes. “So I don’t know how to use a lightsaber.”

“Nope,” Luke agrees. He seems out of breath, but he may well be faking for the sake of Din’s dignity. He seems like the sort of person who would be that kind and that demoralizing at the same time. “But you’re very good with everything else. You’ll pick it up soon enough, if you’d like me to teach you.”

“I’ll think about it.” 

“Okay,” Luke shrugs. He offers him a hand, and Din takes it.

Din finds himself, for the first time in his adult life, in a relatively domestic daily routine: his mornings are mostly his own while Luke ushers the kids out of bed and takes them through drills, so he lingers over his kaf and then goes out to his ship to keep the rust off and check for messages. Afternoons are spent helping with chores and occasionally taking a saber lesson with Luke, though he’d be the first to admit that his heart isn’t really in it. (Thankfully, Luke doesn’t call him on it, but Din’s waiting for that other shoe to drop.) Evenings tend to be boisterous until dinner time, the kids blowing off what remaining steam they have in exploring the temple and coming up with increasingly elaborate games that make no sense to Din, but apparently are very serious business. 

Within the first week, he meets the local friendlies--Ewoks they’re apparently called--and before long he’s managed to cobble together a signing system with them that’s a cross between Tuskan, Galactic Sign, and the local flavor. He barters with them for spare parts and occasionally foodstuffs, which Luke assures him are fine to eat. “They’re omnivorous, so it can be dicey, but they’ve learned what humanoids can digest at this point,” he says. “We had to have a stern talk about that very early on.”

“Poisoned you?”

“Tried to eat me, actually.”

Din stares at him. “They’re very small.”

“And very clever,” Luke huffs. “Watch out for string traps.”

The surface of it all is so idyllic that sometimes Din forgets that the Force enters into it; the kids mostly move small objects and practice meditating, and when they’re not doing that they’re just kids, messing around, learning the ins and outs of Basic while learning each others languages, and generally just keeping each other company. Grogu seems to have bonded closely with the droid on the basis that apparently, they had a brief shared history (“He didn’t spend much time at the old temple,” Luke explains, “But R2 has a way of leaving an impression”) and with Sarkh on the basis that they’re both green. As a result, when he’s not in the crook of Din’s arm he’s either on Luke’s shoulder or catching rides on Sarkh’s back or R2’s foot. It all feels remote and quiet and safe.

He’s only really reminded when he catches Luke alone, and that...that, he can’t quite figure out.

He stumbles on him in what looks like an ad hoc library, carved out of a side room in the temple that might have once been a reliquary. Luke is sitting on the floor, several scrolls scattered around him, but he’s looking up, away from them, his eyes unfocused, his lips moving, noiseless. 

Din halts in the doorway to watch. Luke doesn’t notice him. There is something like a static charge in the room, separate from the normal damp of the forest, and it makes Din’s fingers twitch for his blaster. 

“I don’t agree,” Luke murmurs. “The universe is infinite, and thus, so must be the Force. So must be the ways to be one with it, and to wield it well.” He tips his head back, eyes closing. 

Without knowing why, Din averts his eyes. Though the light hasn’t changed, it’s too bright in the room.

Luke exhales in a rush, raises one hand to his opposite shoulder and clutches, as if someone is gripping him there. Then he flinches.

Din doesn’t think; he steps inside and grasps the claw of Luke’s hand. Then yelps as his fingers nearly get crushed. 

“Mando!” Luke lets go, jerking back, his eyes flying open. The static in the room disperses like a deflated balloon. “Did I hurt you?”

Din shakes out his fingers. “It’s fine,” he says. “Nothing broken.” Probably bruised, but he wasn’t going to mention it. 

“I’m sorry, I was…”

“Who were you talking to?”

Luke’s mouth twists into somewhere between a smile and a grimace. “Old friends, I suppose. We were having a philosophical debate.”

“About the Force?”

“About what being a Jedi should mean,” Luke says. “I’ve been proposing some amendments to the old ways. People have opinions about it.”

“I thought there weren't many Jedi left. Who’s to argue with you?”

Luke lets out a bark of laughter, lighting up his whole face. “You’re completely correct. Perhaps the dead should keep their opinions to themselves.” The last he seems to direct upwards with a sort of pointed humor. But then it’s gone in a blink. 

“What sort of amendments?” Din asks.

“The principles of attachment. Strong emotions.”

Din frowns. “Ashoka said Grogu was attached to me. That was why she didn’t want to train him.”

“Ahsoka,” Luke echoes. “I think my father has mentioned her before as a friend, but I’ve never met her.” He shrugs. “Attachment, when it’s very strong, can warp one’s perception of what is right. Focus too much on one person, one place, and your ability to empathize with a wider and more diverse world diminishes. At least, that was the logic of the Jedi teachings.” He tilts his head. “I think it depends on what the attachment is. Who they are, what they can teach you in return. Grogu has learned loyalty from you, and perseverance. He experienced great betrayal earlier in his life; his attachment to you has helped to heal some of those old wounds.”

Din swallows. His eyes sting. 

“That’s why I came to get him,” Luke continues, inexorable, pinning him in place. “He’s attached, yes, but his attachment has strengthened him. I’ve come to believe that the key to being a Jedi is not to forgo attachments, but to choose them wisely, and know when to strengthen them, or let them go.”

“Oh,” Din says, and then has to stop.

“You know,” Luke says, after a pause, and in a very different tone, “I could ask the same about you and Mandalorians.”

That baffles him enough to recover. “What?”

“Philosophical differences. There are more Mandalorians than there are Jedi, but you--and my sister, who is very well-informed--seem to think not many of them would be happy to know that you’re their new king.”

“Yeah, well,” Din says, turning away, “Apparently I was brought up...my covert wasn’t like others. We have different beliefs about how we’re seen. About what this means,” he adds, tapping the beskar. 

Luke gets to his feet without a sound, the movement lithe and slow. “What does it mean to you?” he asks. There’s no trap in his voice, only curiosity. Din finds himself answering from an unconscious place in him that he doesn’t realize is honest until he hears it aloud.

“It’s the Creed. It’s protection, and control. Unbreakable, but always able to be reforged. No one can take it from us; it can only be given freely. Force will always be met with force.”

Luke smiles distantly. “And when do you give?” 

“When…” Din swallows. “When a bond has been forged. For clan.”

Luke nods. Din can’t look away from him; something about his gaze is magnetic. 

“Grogu told me your name, when he called to me,” Luke says at last. “You did not give it. I would ask it of you freely, if you think it right that I have it.”

“It’s Din,” Din stutters. “Din Djarin.” 

Luke nods, as if it’s new to him, as if he’s honored. “Thank you, Din Djarin,” he says. “I’m so glad to have met you.” He touches Din’s wrist, and by chance his fingers land on the thinnest part of the glove, just past his pulse where the leather was worn and kidskin-soft, and Din’s blood seems to answer the touch with a surge of warmth. 

Then he slips past, leaving Din leaning against the doorway, heart racing, unsure of what the hell just happened.

The peace can’t last. Three weeks in, Luke lets the kids sleep in entirely, and when Din comes in for breakfast it’s to find him hunched over his mug of kaf with a grim expression.

“Leia’s been in touch,” he says, as Din sits down across from him. “I might need you to stay here and look after the kids. R2 will help, they're used to him corralling them.”

“What’s happened?”

“Not sure yet. She’s on her way here to explain.”

But Leia doesn’t explain, or if she does, Din doesn’t hear it. As the kids begin to wake of their own accord, Grogu toddling down and straight into the pantry with a delighted caw at Din along the way, Luke sits blank-faced at the breakfast table, occasionally tipping from side to side, as he nudges Leia’s ship down through the fragments of the Death Star. When his eyes finally refocus, he looks even grimmer than before. 

“I know I’m asking more than I have a right to,” he says to Din. “But this should only take a few days at most. There are lesson plans in the library to go off of, and Kai is old enough to lead the physical exercises. Even if they miss a few days, it’s no problem.”

“You trust me with them?” Din says, almost ready to believe it, but needing to hear it.

Luke just frowns. “Why wouldn’t I? I know exactly the lengths you’ve gone to in order to keep Grogu safe, I have every confidence in your ability to keep the others healthy and happy on a friendly, secure planet for a few days. You’re kind, and you have a solid sense of boundaries; that’s pretty much all they need.”

“Will I be able to reach you, if something goes wrong?”

“I’d reach out to the Ewoks first. They’re right here, and they look out for the kids when they’re running around the woods. More serious things? You can send a transmission from my X-wing.”

Din walks him to where Leia touches down, and doesn’t miss that she keeps the engines running. 

“C’mon Skywalker, let’s move,” she says in greeting, kissing Luke on the cheek as he passes her going up the gangplank. She looks past him to Din and nods. “Mando. I’ll try and get him back here as soon as I can.”

“It’s fine,” Din says. 

“Sure,” she says, not sounding convinced. “By the way, do you know Magistrate Wing, from Calodan on Corvus?”

“I’ve been to Calodan,” Din offers. 

Her lips flatten, but she just nods. “Yeah, I thought so. All right, well, take care.”

And with that, they’re gone.

The fastest way to young padawans’ hearts, Din learns, is to a) start contributing absurd rules to their already-absurd games, b) have one-sided arguments with the R2 unit that he inevitably loses, and c) give piggyback rides.

Luke and Leia return on day four, and they both look as though they haven’t slept the entire time. Din doesn’t meet them at the clearing, because he’s not a goddamn Jedi, and Dara only senses them once they appear at the edge of the masking shield looking half past death. 

When Din goes out to meet them, Leia straightens up, points imperiously at her brother, and says, “Get this nerf-herder into a bed before he brains himself on another tree branch. Is there kaf?”

“Mando!” Luke says, clearly drunk with sleep deprivation and delighted about it. “How’s everyone?” He goes to pat Din on the shoulder and overshoots; Din grabs his hand and slings it around his neck to steady him. Luke’s head hits his shoulder with an undignified, “Oof! _Ow,_ ” but then he seems to just let go, and Din finds himself taking most of his warm weight. He tries to ignore it.

“Everyone is fine,” he reports, and looks over at Leia. “I made some kaf about two hours ago, haven’t finished it. If you don’t mind stale, it’s yours?”

“I like you,” Leia declares. “Lead the way.”

Luke Skywalker, it turns out, is sort of a mess outside of being a Jedi. He refuses to be put to bed _because it’s light out, my planetary sleep rhythm, Mando!_ and ends up slumped at the breakfast table, smiling and sending the kids out to do random tasks as they each greet him while Leia slams back the remainder of the kaf. 

“What the hell was this about, anyway?” Din asks finally, and Leia gives him the flattest look.

“You and your nonsense, is what,” she says. “Moff kriffing Gideon is rolling with laughter in his cell, no doubt.”

“I don’t...have _nonsense_ ,” Din says, offended.

“The king of Mandalore has entrusted his foundling to a Jedi of the New Republic, and he claims he has no nonsense.” She rolls her eyes. “Honestly.”

“It’s really nonsense,” Luke confides, listing in Din’s direction. “They don’t know you’re king, and they haven’t even got the Jedi right.” Any more of an obtuse angle, and Din’s going to have to catch him before he hits the floor. 

“What do you--oh. They think I gave Grogu to Ahsoka?”

“There were tales out of Corvus,” Leia explains. “They’ve gotten some traction, it seems. A Mandalorian giving up a foundling to a Jedi, regardless of rank, is newsworthy, given their history.”

“But you just told them it wasn’t true, right?” Din says, sitting forward. 

“You think the Senate believes half the things I say? I wish,” Leia says, rolling her eyes. “That kind of rumor, your only tactic is to divert, not deny.”

“So you...diverted it?”

She sighs. “We tried. Three formal all-night dinners and a goddamn committee review worth of trying. But remember what I said about delaying the inevitable? Well, the inevitable is fast approaching, so we need to start thinking about a game plan.”

Din exhales. “What exactly is the inevitable?”

“Moff Gideon goes to trial soon. He’s going to start talking, and as you well know, he’s good at talking. He’s going to say something about you.”

“He knows about the history of the darksaber.”

She nods. “Yes. So the likelihood is that it’s going to come to light that you’re the ruler of Mandalore. If you don’t start stating your intentions about it, someone else will, pretending to be your mouthpiece. And there are plenty of Senate aides dying for a chance to claim a connection to a new-fangled ruler who just _happens_ to want to start talks with the New Republic.”

“Mandalore is a dead planet. I’ve never been there, but everyone says it’s glassed.”

Leia shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Why?” Din asks, exasperated. “There’s _nothing there_. It’s a toxic hellscape.”

“A toxic hellscape full of abandoned cities containing the records and belongings of the old Mandalorians. It’s like the darksaber--the history and the story makes it important. Mandalore might not be habitable, but it’s a symbol of your people, and as such, its ownership and rulership still matter, even if no one’s actually there to occupy it.”

“Tell him. What would the New Republic get out of it, if they had it in their jurisdiction?” Luke asks, propping his head up with one hand, eyes half-lidded.

“Supply routes, for one,” Leia answers readily, looking at Din. “Mandalorian airspace stands directly between the Core and systems like Felucia and Yavin. But even if you just agreed to let the New Republic pass through Mandalore’s airspace, it would need to take the form of a treaty, which means formal recognition of Mandalore as an independent state, which means formal recognition of the state’s leadership. Unless, of course, Mandalore were to become a vassal to the New Republic.”

“Bad idea,” Din says automatically. 

“I don’t disagree,” Leia says, putting her hands up. “Mandalorian independence was the reason for at least half the disputes the Mandalorians had with the Old Republic, and caused a civil war on top of that. I don’t want to steer you towards that.” She pauses, flicks a look at Luke, and adds, “But I will say that an airspace accord would give us the ability to provide more protection for the Outer Rim systems, which seems like it may be a good idea, given the imperial activity you and your friends have uncovered.”

“I can’t just decide some accord with the New Republic for Mandalore,” Din protests. “I don’t even know where most Mandalorians are now, or what they think.”

Leia doesn’t say anything, just watches him over the rim of her cup.

“I’m going to have to call a meeting or something, aren’t I?” he realizes with extreme dread.

“Probably,” she agrees. “Which means we need to get you off-world and arrange some sort of presentation to the galaxy.”

“But…”

“It’s this, or let Corr Killian claim to be the voice of the Mand’alore.”

“Who the hell is Corr Killian?”

“Horrible man,” Luke says with a shudder. “Awful, black-hole kind of man.”

“He’s a black hole in the Force,” Leia clarifies, at Din’s expectant turn in her direction. “Let’s just say that Killian was a slimy pro-Imperial back in the day, and he’ll relapse given half a chance now. He keeps trying to have a private conversation with Moff Gideon, and I’ve blocked him so far, but he’s slippery, he’ll get through soon enough.”

Din feels himself slump over the table, as if he’s been in the same endless meetings Luke and Leia had just endured. “Maybe if I just lose to Bo-Katan now, she’ll count it as honorable,” he mutters.

He hasn’t spoken to Bo-Katan since the cruiser. After Luke had gone, Din had put his helmet back on with shaking hands, and turned back to her. “Are you _sure_ I can’t just give this to you?” he asked, lifting the darksaber from his hip.

Bo-Katan had narrowed her eyes. “Even if I did, even if my rule was accepted and I took back Mandalore with it--which, I should add, you’ve made extremely unlikely by this _display--_ I would have to live with knowing how it came back to me. You keep it. I will take back our planet with or without it. And I’d ask that you continue to consider joining me in that endeavor.”

“I’ll think about it,” he’d repeated, and then he’d gone with Boba Fett and Cara to Nevarro, stood once again in the ruins of his covert while they dealt with the Moff, and felt his world narrow and narrow until it was once again safe for him to go out and work without dwelling too much on what he’d lost.

Leia shakes her head. “Even if she does win it off you, it doesn’t change the fact that word has gotten around that a Mandalorian foundling has been entrusted with a Jedi. That kind of stuff will be brought to the negotiating table, and whether you’re at that table or Bo-Katan is, we’re going to have to deal with it.”

“What do you want me to do?” Din asks, tired to his bones.

“What I want is irrelevant,” Leia says. “But if you’re asking my advice, I’d say that the bare minimum you should do is announce your position as king, and make clear that no one speaks for you but you.”

“How the hell do you even make an announcement like that?” he wonders. 

At that, Leia finally smiles. “That, you can leave up to me.” 

She leaves the next day. Luke is still asleep when she comes down to the kitchen, and Din gives her a mug of kaf in silence. “You’re a prince,” she mutters, and then smirks over the mug. “Or a king, as the case may be.”

“Please don’t remind me.”

“I’ve got to get back to the Senate,” she says, as she packs up. “Things are moving fast, and I can’t have them making banthashit decisions without me.”

“Corr Killian?”

“Among others,” she says darkly. “You think Imps are exclusive to the Outer Rim nowadays? There are a handful that still rule inner New Republic planets, they’re just better at hiding it than Gideon was.”

“That’s not encouraging.”

“No. But we’re doing something about it. We’re going to keep fighting.” She slings her pack over her shoulder. “With your permission, I’d like to begin working on breaking the news that there’s a new king of Mandalore,” she says. “Do you grant it?”

He swallows down the automatic spike of alarm. “I don’t…”

“It will come out,” Leia says gently. “It’s just a matter of when and how.”

“Not if I lose the darksaber to someone else before then.”

“Who, Luke? You’d have better luck with Dara, she’s at least adequately ambitious.”

He shakes his head, his fear unspeakable, inexplicable. No stormtrooper, pirate, or moff could compare. 

“Think about it,” Leia says finally. “Let me know if you change your mind. Luke can pass a message to me.”

He walks her out as far as the masking shield.

“You don’t want to say goodbye to him?”

“Let him sleep. I’m used to politics, but he’s not, it wears him out more than air combat.”

“Is he...how is it that you two grew up so differently?”

Leia purses her lips. 

“You don’t have to answer if you—”

“We were given to different families, when our father fell and became Vader. I went to Alderaan, he went to Tatooine.” Her mouth twists. “I was brought up to lead. He was brought up a farmer. I don’t know why...I don’t know what determined that choice. I wonder what it was Obi-Wan and others saw in the Force that made them place us that way, whether it entered into their calculations at all, whether it was chance. I do know that Luke is a terrible politician, and that I would be a terrible farmer. But, I don’t know. Was it the porg or the egg who came first?”

“...Sorry,” Din says blankly, “your father was Darth Vader?”

Leia looks up into the sky and sighs from the bottom of her soul. “Luke, you _idiot._ ”

When he gets back to the temple, Kai and Grogu are at the breakfast table, Grogu in Kai’s lap, the both of them wolfing down tip-yip eggs. “Is Princess Leia gone?” Kai asks.

“Yep.”

“Aw. I like her. Master Skywalker gets much brighter when she’s here.”

Din cocks his head, and goes over to the cabinet to grab a ration packet. “How do you mean?” 

Kai twists up their face, whiskers twitching as they think. “It’s like...you ever squeeze your eyes really tight shut and then open them real fast? And there’s like...a shine to everything?”

“...Sure.”

“It’s like that. Master Skywalker is always very bright, but when Princess Leia is here, the shine gets bigger. It’s like a feedback loop, because Princess Leia is very bright too, and they keep reflecting back at each other. It’s warm and nice.”

“Huh. Is Master Skywalker awake yet?”

Kai shook their head. “No. He’s very tired, he’s all murky.” 

“All right. If I wake up Dara and Sarkh, will you guys be okay to do your exercises on your own this morning?”

“Yeah, we’ll be fine. Can we play hide-and-find, after?” Grogu burbles urgently in support, waving eggy hands; Grogu _loves_ hide-and-find. 

“Sure, knock yourselves out. Plan to be back here around 1300 for lunch.”

He nudges Dara and Sarkh awake and ushers them downstairs for their own helpings of eggs, and then he goes to Luke’s room. 

Luke looks to have mostly passed out where he landed, boots in a pile at the corner of the sleeping ledge, the tunic and trousers of his formal dress still on. Even with his face smashed into a balled-up corner of blanket, Din gets the same strange jangle of static from seeing him as he did in the library, like the universe is stretching thin around him. 

“Din?” Luke murmurs, shifting.

“You’re not going to be able to turn your head tomorrow if you keep sleeping like that,” Din says, plastering himself to the doorframe.

Luke grumbles, rolling onto one side. “I should...the padawans.”

“They’re taking care of themselves. Sleep.” Din has begun to suspect that Force-sensitive kids have unnaturally rich inner lives--he doesn’t remember the kids in his covert being nearly so self-contained.

Luke frowns. “Grogu.”

“With them,” Din says. “It’s fine.”

That has Luke cracking an eye open. “Is it?” 

“Should it not be?”

“No.” He slides onto his back this time, hips dislodging the wodge of blankets he’s been sleeping on, and sighs, deep and heavy. Din’s hands clench over nothing. “Just wasn’t sure you’d be fine with it. I know you’re protective of him, which is only what he deserves, after all he’s been through. He’s safe here, but it’s one thing for him to know it, another for you to feel the same.”

Feeling separate from himself, almost disembodied, Din walks forward and retrieves the blanket, now nearly fallen off the ledge entirely. He casts it over Luke and has to resist the urge to tuck it around his shoulders, up against his neck. 

“They’re good kids,” he says roughly. “How long have you had them?”

“Barely a year,” Luke murmurs, watching him through slitted eyes. He still sounds a little sleep drunk, but the words come clear enough. “Kai was given up to me by the fostering system on Coruscant while I was still trying to adjust to post-war life. Dara called to me a bit like Grogu did, she was orphaned in a Felucian backwater town, no way out. Sarkh fought his way to me through Hutt-space, and I met him halfway. They’re all strong, with or without the Force.

“But I wouldn’t have come for them if they hadn’t been kind, too. They all glow in the Force, they all...it’s hard to describe.”

“Try,” Din says.

“They’re like sunspots,” Luke says, smiling faintly. “And I will give them a home, and teach them to bring life, the way suns do.” 

Din is hovering, he can't pull away. "It sounds good, when you say it."

"It is good." His head flops in Din’s direction. "You could do the same, you know."

"What, save more foundlings?" The idea wasn't unappealing.

"I mean, sure," one of his shoulders twitch in a prone shrug. "But now you could give them a home, too. The way you care for your son, it's...if you had any sensitivity to the Force at all I’d have wanted to teach you, too." He shifts again, and his hand lands on Din's forearm, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. "Think about it."

"Did Leia tell you to say that?" Din manages, heart in his throat.

"Nah. She doesn't know you that way. I know you from Grogu, I have home advantage." He grins and closes his eyes. Moments later, he's asleep again.

Din gives in, and tucks the blanket around his shoulders, lingering on the swell of his bicep. Then he goes out to his ship, and works the rust out of the undercarriage until he can’t feel his fingers. 

“Okay, so,” he says, two days later, over lunch. “Lightsabers. I get the forms, but I’m missing something.”

Luke freezes halfway to blocking Grogu from putting an entire fish in his mouth, which means that Grogu manages not only to gulp the thing down, but the whole table gets to hear the sound of fishbones splintering and collapsing as he swallows. Din would be impressed if he wasn’t just relieved that he’ll never have to worry about choking hazards. 

“Gross,” Dara comments. 

“Extremely gross,” Sarkh says in admiration.

“Ah,” Luke says at last, sitting back. “Yes. Form has never been my strong suit, to be honest; I was taught during wartime, neither of my masters bothered much with it beyond how it helped me connect with the Force. I had thought we’d start with it because it won’t really be much about the Force with you, but perhaps I was wrong about that. We can try something different this afternoon, if you like.”

Din nods. “Yeah, okay.”

“Can we watch?” Kai asks, a little wide-eyed.

“Sure,” Luke says, not looking away from Din. “We’ll make it a masterclass.”

“Only if you all promise not to laugh at me,” Din says, jabbing fingers at the children, who giggle. 

“We never laugh at you, Mando,” Dara says with such solemnity that it circles right back to mockery in an instant. 

“Stop learning from Princess Leia,” Luke orders, laughing. “The galaxy isn’t ready for two of you yet.”

They go out to the clearing where the kids usually meditate and practice floating stones; it just borders on Ewok territory, and if he looks closely Din can spot one or two in the trees, keeping watch. 

“Let’s start really basic,” Luke proposes. “Just activating the blade. What do you feel when you draw it?”

Din weighs the darksaber in his hands for a moment, then flicks it on. The blade forms and grows like a desert spearplant cutting up through dense soil to meet the sun, its friction with the air almost like distant thunder, or a powerstation connecting with the grid for the first time. “It’s heavy,” he says eventually. 

Luke nods. “Do you remember how Gideon fought with it?” 

“Like it was heavy,” Din shrugs. “A broadsword, almost, or an oversized cutlass.” 

“All strength, not a lot of finesse,” Luke surmises. “I think we can do better than that. Close your eyes.” 

Din closes them. The hum of the blade seems to get louder, tremble in his hand more acute. 

“Now, let’s go through the forms. Four full cuts, walking forward, in the direction of my voice. I won’t let you trip.”

“How fast?”

“I’ll count off. Ready?”

“Sure.”

“One.”

Din swung down, angled to the right shoulder. Waited.

“Two, but slower, smooth as you can.”

Din has fought in the dark before, but his helmet usually supplies visibility and insights into the terrain. Without that, the earth feels unmoored, treacherous beneath his feet. He steps forward again, draws back and strikes slow to the left, hearing the thunder as it passes his ear. It feels as if he’s cutting through sand, heavy static grinding along the edge of the blade.

“Three. Stop thinking.”

“How?” Din mutters, stepping forward.

“Listen instead. Even slower now, four. You’re not cutting through anything, it should feel like breathing.”

The hum escalates. He leans into it, following the sound. For a moment, his grip almost slips; the blade suddenly dropping through the air, gravity taking it.

“Good. Start back at one, keep coming, slow and steady, wrist loose. Looser. I know it feels heavy, but right now, pretend it’s not.”

By the sound of Luke’s voice, he’s moving them in a wide circle along the edge of the clearing. Din listens and follows. 

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

Din hears it before anything else, and he forgets to think; he comes out of the fourth strike into an overhand block and parries Luke’s oncoming blow with a crack of light. His eyes fly open at the impact. 

Overhead, vivid black meets incandescent green, and the darksaber feels _weightless._

Luke grins at him. “Good. Now push me back.”

He twists the blades down and makes two strikes, pressing forward, hand vibrating around the hilt, and the blade whistles like a gale, moving at the faintest flick of his wrist, he has to adjust his grip to keep it from flying away like a bird. Luke meets him strike for strike, uncanny fast and smiling, switching from one-handed to two and back, twisting to meet and evade him, and Din gives chase, lighter than air.

“Watch your footwork—”

Lighter than air, lighter than—

_“Oof.”_

“Yield.”

“Ugh. Yeah, I yield,” Din says from the ground. Off from the sidelines, the kids are all yelling and clapping, but they sound far off, quiet. The darksaber retracts like water flowing, easy and soft. 

Luke offers a hand, and he takes it. “Don’t forget who you are,” he advises. “You’re a Mandalorian, you’ll always be at your best with your feet firmly on the ground.” 

“Counterpoint,” Din says. “I have a jetpack.”

“And how do you feel about fighting hand-to-hand while trying to control a jetpack?” Luke replies, raising an eyebrow.

“...Point.” 

“Beskar is heavy, and that’s how it should be. But the darksaber isn’t made of beskar. It doesn’t have to be heavy like this is.” He taps the top of Din’s pauldron. “Not if you understand how it should be, and let it be yours.”

Din peers at him with suspicion. “Is this a metaphor?”

Luke grins. “Maybe just a little.”

They start practicing every day after that. Luke has to adjust his methods a bit to account for the darksaber’s unusual shape, which leaves Din to develop some of his own techniques, and slowly, he begins to win bouts. 

Grogu is unreasonably excited about this development, or at least Luke claims he is.

“He’s very proud of you,” he says, as Din helps him to his feet. “Fully convinced he’s got the best dad in the galaxy, although for the record I don’t think that was ever in doubt.”

“Paatu!” Grogu burbles, reaching up from Sarkh’s back spines. Din leans down to scoop him up, and as he does he hears Sarkh murmur, “He’s lucky.”

Din pauses, and then crouches down, tucking Grogu into the crook of his arm. “He’s lucky, because I was, a long time ago,” he says.

Sarkh startles, blinks widely at him. “Oh,” he stammers. “You, too?”

 _He fought his way to me through Hutt-space,_ Luke had said. “Yeah,” he says. “Lost everything, but then I fell into good hands. They gave me the tools to take care of myself.”

Sarkh nods. “Lucky us.”

“Yeah,” Din agrees, and looks past his shoulder to where Luke was standing, Kai and Dara hanging off each arm. He nods at them, and Luke offers him half a smile.

Late that evening, Din finds him in the library, the stacks of books and scrolls all reshuffled, and amid them, a notebook Luke was scribbling in furiously. “You really think I should claim Mandalore?” he asks, leaning in the doorframe.

Luke jumps, and off in the corner, a pot of tea clatters to the ground. Din hadn’t even noticed it was floating, which he supposes says something about his growing comfort around Jedi sorcery.

“I think you should do what you think will be best for you and your people,” Luke says, once he’s straightened out his robes, the teapot, and his notebook. He says it very neutrally, very evenly. It’s the complete opposite of the way he’d spoken while half-asleep, sprawled in his bed. 

Din crosses his arms. “That’s it?”

Luke wraps his robes tighter around himself, shoulders hunching in. Din often forgets how small he is, nearly boyish still, except for how the universe seems to always refract around him. His hair falls in his eyes as he tips his head down to contemplate the scrolls at his feet. 

“If you’re looking for my opinion as a Jedi, then yes.”

That isn’t an answer. Din chews on the absences around it for a second, and then says, “I’m not. Looking for a Jedi’s opinion, that is. I’d...I want to know your opinion.”

“As your son’s teacher?” Luke offers.

“No, just...” he casts around, finds nothing, “just _you.”_

“Ah.” He smiles, tipping his head back down, and Din can’t tell whether that was the right answer or not, so he stays quiet, waiting and hoping.

“A part of me does think you should take up the title. You have the potential to be a great axis for the Mandalorians, a point of positive inflection. This is what I see when I look at you in the Force, it’s...it’s very bright. Hard to look away from.” He looks down at his hands.

“But another part of me wants you to be happy and safe,” he continues, still sounding careful, too careful. “The king of Mandalore will be neither of those things, at least not all the time.”

“No one’s happy all the time,” Din points out. “And I can take care of myself.”

“That was never in doubt,” Luke nods. “And you’re right. But rebuilding Mandalore will be a long and thankless process, and you’ve lived for a long time doing thankless work. I want better for you than that.”

Din stares at him. “Oh,” he says. There’s a strange ringing in his ears, the rush of his own blood audible inside his helmet; he’s not sure he can feel his hands. “That’s. Uh.”

Luke cocks his head at him.

“That’s not really part of the Creed,” he finally manages. His voice sounds foreign to him.

Luke hums, dropping his gaze. “It’s not really part of the Jedi code, either,” he murmurs. “But I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve begun to take issue with some of its tenets.” He smiles. “Then again, I think this quibble is mostly selfish, so I don’t think I can be as cavalier about it as the other ones.”

“Doesn’t seem selfish to me,” Din grunts. “You want this for me, but you don’t wish the same for yourself?”

“I know my role to play in the universe,” Luke says simply, opening one hand. “It’s not useful to wish for anything else, anymore.”

Din exhales, and steps fully into the room. “You,” he starts, and isn’t it strange? how Luke doesn’t back up, doesn’t flinch as he strides forward in full armor, doesn’t move until Din grasps the tender part of his elbow, walks him backwards until he hits the bookshelf. “You’re so much,” he breathes.

“I don’t mean to be,” Luke says, almost apologetic, and Din shakes his head, frustrated beyond recognition.

“No, don’t stop, you just—” he tips his head forward like defeat, and he can feel the moment when the gravity stops, when his helmet meets Luke’s forehead, and they both just freeze, breathing in time, pressure and momentum in lockstep, and he wonders wildly whether Luke understands, whether there’s a chance that he _knows_ what this means, what this contact is.

“I,” he breathes into the suspension. “You can’t just.”

“I’ll do whatever I think is right,” Luke replies, and his hand comes up, thumb on the lower edge of his helmet, fingers curling at the curve of his neck, and it’s too much, it’s too much and not enough, he _wants._

“You’ve seen me,” he mutters. “You seen me already, so it doesn’t matter, we’re—”

Luke sucks in a breath and goes still. “It does matter, though,” he says. “Doesn’t it? You haven’t taken it off since that first time.”

Din presses in further, shudders. His shoulders slump of their own accord. “It matters,” he confirms, briefly hating it, and relieved.

Luke strokes his hand along the nape of his neck. “Be sure,” he says. “I’m here.”

In the morning, Din says, “Tell your sister she can do whatever it is she’s been itching to do.”

Luke looks at him for a long moment, and then answers, “Consider it done.”

Several weeks pass, and then one morning Din goes out to his ship to check for messages and finds one from Leia that includes with it a data packet marked _GideonTrial2383-3840._

“Here’s the first volley,” she says in the holo, looking like a lothcat who’s gotten cream. “Keep your head down until I say so.”

“The hell,” Din mutters, and opens the data packet.

It’s a court transcript. Mostly dry, it consists of a recitation of evidence against Moff Gideon starting with war crimes from before the Alliance even formed, and ending with his capture and custody. The one bit that catches his attention, however, is towards the end, where the Accusator cites “Exhibit 412.a-c, testimony and security footage from the Imperial light cruiser _Tarsis-8.”_

And then, the following exchange:

_Senator Organa: Accusator, this footage shows the accused wielding an unusual weapon in assaults against the borders of the cruiser. Can you tell us about this weapon? Is it of imperial make?_

_Accusator: Senator, it is not. Our research suggests, and this is affirmed by the secured testimony of Moff Gideon, that this weapon, known as the Darksaber, was taken by Gideon during the looting and destruction of Mandalore._

_SO: So this weapon falls under the Repatriation Act?_

_A: It does. Or rather, it would, but later footage in Exhibit 413.e indicates that repatriation has already occurred._

_[indistinct discussion among the Senators and audience; the floor is called to order]_

_SO: That’s excellent news, Accusator. Am I to understand that it has been returned to the Mandalorian people?_

_A: More specifically, it has been won back by a certain Mandalorian, whom we have been unable to identify as yet. Nevertheless, I believe we can at least consider this aspect of the accused’s crimes resolved._

_SO: Thank you, Accusator. Please continue._

“Huh,” Din says aloud. He brings the data packet back with him to the temple, only to find Luke waiting for him, when usually Din would expect him to be out with the kids. Grogu is sitting at the table with him, slurping down bone broth, ears twitching in enjoyment.

“Made her move?” Luke asks wryly, flicking his glance down to the data stick in Din’s hand.

“I guess. How is this an announcement, though? It’s just a trial transcript, no one reads those.”

“If I were to guess, having seen my sister in action for a few years now, this is just the preamble,” Luke replies. “And you’re not quite right--some people read them, specifically news agencies and politicians. The sort of people whose interest will be piqued by the mention of the Repatriation Act, and doubly so by the mention of a yet-to-be-identified Mandalorian. Enough of them do their research, and they’ll find out about the history and legend of the Darksaber.

“And then,” he goes on, sitting back and watching Din carefully, “when there’s enough whispering and speculation going around, she’ll leak some key pieces of the cruiser footage.”

“That’ll make it out to the Rim?” Din wonders. He sits down next to Grogu, who puts his bowl down and makes it very clear that it is time to be held. Din obliges, setting him on his lap and feeling settled by it immediately, which is perhaps why Grogu demanded it in the first place.

“I guess we’ll see,” Luke says. 

News doesn’t really get to Endor without some effort; Din occasionally gets encrypted messages from Cara that have been bounced across several planetary systems before making their way to him, and Luke relies on Leia to give him the highlights through the Force, which Din doesn’t pretend to understand. As such, three days is a very short amount of time in which to expect anything to come of Leia’s political machinations, and yet when Din goes to check his messages again, a message from Cara pops up:

_We need to talk, Your Highness._

“Is there a way to open a secure line of communication here?” Din asks at lunch, after having spent most of the rest of the morning lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling of his ship in existential dread.

“Not easily,” Luke answers. “But there’s an orbiting waystation off Tana, our local planet. It’s not often occupied, but it gets checked on reasonably often, so everything should be in working order.”

“Great,” Din says in resignation. “I’ll need a path for takeoff and return.”

“Of course.” Luke looks at him in sympathy. “Spar when you get back?”

“I’ll need it,” he mutters.

The waystation isn’t hard to lock onto, and its landing pad is fully automated, for which Din is thankful; he’s in no real state to interact with people. It’s empty but has signs of a quick inspection less than a week back, no dust and a New Republic stamp on a calendar posted up by the communications room. Din procrastinates looking around for a few minutes before he gets up the courage to sit down and set up the encrypted channel; no need for anyone to know which waystation he’s using. 

Cara answers almost immediately. “Mando, you certainly know how to make waves.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“Oh no?” Her raised eyebrow is extremely judgemental, even through the holo. “I thought you didn’t want to be king.”

“I don’t. But apparently if I don’t take the title, some Galactic Senator is going to claim he knows me and start making deals in my name.”

“Is it Killian? I knew that guy was shady.”

“What did you actually want to talk about?” he sighs.

“Another bounty just dropped for the kid, but it’s not the Imps, far as we can tell. I think it’s meant to draw you out of hiding. Greef’s running interference, but some other operator’s going to take the bait soon enough.”

“If they want me, they can have me,” Din growls, “But if they bring the kid into it, I’m going to mow them down.”

“I’d choose your battleground far from wherever he is, then,” Cara replies, looking unsurprised. “Is he all right? Any news from the Jedi?”

“No news,” he says, which is technically true, at least within the past day.

“You do know where he is now, right?”

“Not precisely.” Also technically true--it was late afternoon at the temple, Grogu was probably playing Lasers-and-Mirrors with Kai, which could take place anywhere around the grounds or forest.

Cara sighs. “Well, if you’re confident he’s safe for now, that’s good. I thought I’d just give you a heads up.”

“I appreciate it.”

“You’ll let me know if you need anything?”

“Yeah.” He pauses. “Actually, I think I have a favor to ask you.”

He gets back after dinnertime, Luke guiding his ship down through the wreckage as a sleepy, warm presence at the back of Din’s head. 

“What’s happened?” he asks, when Din gets to the temple. 

“They’re after the kid again,” Din replies. “Only they’re doing it to find me.” 

Luke’s expression tightens, and the air seems to tighten with him. “What do you want to do about it?” he asks. 

Din tilts his head. “I have some ideas. But I need your help.”

“Anything,” Luke says, easy as breathing, and Din believes him.

Luke leaves the next morning. 

“Are you sure we can’t help?” Kai asks. 

“I’d rather you were somewhere safe,” Luke says. “And keeping each other safe, too.”

“But—”

“You’ll get other chances,” Din says. “It’s not that we don’t think you can handle it.” He wonders fleetingly when he started thinking of himself and Luke as a _we,_ and then immediately has to dismiss it before he’s distracted. 

“May the Force be with you,” Dara says, and when Luke hugs her, she tucks her face into his shoulder. 

“I’ll be back as quick as I can,” he promises. “And if anything bad happens and you need help, you can call for me, and I’ll hear you.” When he withdraws, he steps over to Din and puts a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be in touch as soon as everything’s in place.”

“Be careful,” Din advises. “Both of you.”

“We’re going to be fine. Trust me?”

“Apparently,” Din sighs. Luke huffs out a laugh, and his thumb catches over the hollow along Din’s collarbone in such a way that Din resigns himself to feeling it for days.

“Bye,” Luke murmurs. “But only for now.”

It takes a week. 

“How’s Greef?”

“Happy to play along,” Luke reports, smiling back. "Sends his regards."

“Hm. How much longer do you need?"

"Not long. We're waiting to hear back from the client, but I'm hopeful. Leia is on her way to you now."

"Sure you're both okay?"

"Never better."

Din exhaled. "Okay. I'm going to head off when she gets here." 

"If you don't hear from me, go to Yavin IV first. There's a rebel base there that has decent comms, and I considered basing myself there a while back."

"Got it. Talk to you soon."

The kids do their best to keep him distracted in the intervening days, but it isn't nearly enough. He practices forms and runs drills, and does more cooking than he ever has before in his life.

"This is....not terrible," Dara admits on the third day, and Kai hums agreement.

"Thanks," Din said dryly, and feels pleased all the same.

Another week, and Leia finally arrives in a bad mood and on a worse ship that looks like it had been dinged a couple of times on the way down.

"Not a word," she growls, when Din meets her at the clearing. "I don't practice as much as Luke does."

"I didn't even know you could do the things he does."

"Twins," she shrugs. "It's often genetic, apparently."

That's...terrifying, but okay. Then he remembers Darth Vader, and has to put that out of his mind with extreme prejudice. "I guess I can trust you with these guys, huh?"

"I'll take good care of them," she says with a softened expression. "Though not for very long, I'm on a tight schedule, you know."

"We'll try to be quick."

He leaves in the evening, too nervous to wait. The trip is going to be long anyway, so he figures he might as well be leisurely about it. Kai sees him off, just as seriously as she had Luke.

"Are they going to keep coming after him, do you think?" she asks, almost too quietly for him to hear.

"I hope not," he says. "But it doesn't matter. Whether it’s him or you, Luke will always look after you, keep you safe."

"And you too, right?"

He exhales. "Yeah. Me too."

He sleeps most of the journey, the hyperspace route well-trodden. When he arrives on Yavin, it’s to an empty base and no messages.

He makes himself eat, and sleep again. Eat again, sleep again. Try not to think.

In the morning, at last, there's a ping from the rebel base.

"They've taken the bait," Luke says, but something about his expression is troubled.

"So where are we meeting them?" Din asks, sitting forward.

"That's the thing. I know your friend said they weren’t imps, but they've requested the rendezvous on Mandalore."

Din breathes through his nose, hears the rush of it in his helmet. "This is political."

"We suspected that," Luke says, measured. "Whether it was imps or someone else."

"I know, I just."

"l know it seems very pointless to you," Luke says, watching him through the holo.

"It's not that I don't understand it's important," Din says, hearing himself and feeling helpless.

“It's that the fact of its importance is offensive to you," Luke finishes, "I know. We're going to fix it."

He tips his head down. "So when is the rendezvous?"

"Day after tomorrow. Come in the morning, I'll meet you at the center dome, I'll send coordinates." He moves to switch off the commlink, but Din says, “Wait,” and he pauses.

Din breathes through his nose. “Bo-Katan should know about this. It’s her homeworld.”

“That could complicate things,” Luke says, tilting his head. “But it doesn’t hurt to have backup. Are you sure?”

For better or worse, Din supposes that he is; or if he isn’t, he never will be, and that would present a whole host of other problems. 

“I really hope she doesn’t try to kill me,” he sighs. 

A quick jump through hyperspace, and then: Mandalore.

Din wonders if he should have a feeling of homecoming as he approaches. He doesn't; it looks like every other uninhabitable rock he's ever flown by without a second glance. Red sands, high winds, almost the appearance of a gas giant, formed of rock and storms. He has to strain the janky converter to its limits just to get through the atmosphere in one piece, and then he follows Luke's directions down to a low cluster of domed structures that must have once been the capital city of Mandalore, or at least its entrance. He wonders if he'll recognize anything at all, or if it will be like looking at Bo-Katan, a fun-house reflection of himself.

He passes through a low atmo shield, which holds back the worst of the winds, and then lands not far from the central dome, behind a blown out craft hangar. Checks his armor, and the darksaber. Breathes.

His comm pings. 

“Well, we’re here,” Bo-Katan says, sounding sour. “What the hell is so important that you of all people wanted to come to Mandalore?” 

“Thanks for coming. Do you know where the main entrance is?”

She sighs. “Yes. This better be good, Mando.”

“Hm.”

They need to get underground as quickly as possible; they have atmosphere, but it can only be filtered for so long before standard scrubbers would begin to fail and the toxicity would begin to leak through their breathing systems. Bo-Katan and Koska Reeves come around from the opposite end of the hangar, and with hand signals Bo-Katan leads the way to a dusty pressurized door secured with a keypad. When she enters a code, however, it turns red and beeps sullenly.

She pauses, and makes a signal to the effect of _what the hell._

Din begins to have a very bad feeling. He steps forward, fastens a generalized breaker to the underside, and sets it going.

 _Five minutes,_ Reeves signs. Five more minutes before the air becomes unbreathable. The breaker is going to take at least three.

They wait.

The breaker flickers with numbers almost too fast to see.

_Three minutes._

_Two_.

The light goes green, and they pile in with graceless efficiency, scrambling through the airlock and into the antechamber beyond. Darkness closes them in, and Din feels his way to a control pad that, with the sound of generators groaning, offers up the meager flow of old incandescent light.

Bo-Katan rips off her helmet. "Someone has been here," she hisses. "They've changed the code. Who the hell has been occupying our planet while we have been scattered and without a home?"

“I guess we’ll find out." Din says.

She lets out a long breath and looks at him with gravity. "Thank you for calling me here. I won't forget it."

He shrugs. "Don't thank me yet." Something feels very wrong. It isn't quiet enough, the generators kicking on too fast in this area to have been fully dormant elsewhere. He can’t hear activity yet, but that offers little comfort.

"Where do we need to be?" Reeves asks.

Luke had given directions that had clearly been second-hand. "Central meeting hall?"

"That's a ways. We should get going."

He and Reeves fall into place behind her. She takes them along a series of corridors, mostly unlit, but even in the gloom words and etchings are visible on the walls, though in a script ancient enough that Din doesn't recognize it beyond general sentiments, which are themselves both familiar and not. Strength and loyalty. Dedication to clan, and to war. Armor, inside and out.

There are brackets on the walls, too, for armaments and monuments, though they all are empty. Din doesn't need to ask Bo-Katan what had happened to what they had held.

Many minutes later, they turn a corner, and suddenly, Din can hear voices. 

Bo-Katan holds up her hand for them to stop behind her at a pair of closed blast doors. Din taps her on the shoulder, tilts his head, and she nods. He steps in front. Strains to listen.

"I got your prize, the price is non-negotiable," says a voice distorted through a vocoder. "I don't trust the New Republic, that's the only reason I required a meeting."

"Hmm. Just the New Republic?" The other speaker is nasal, unfamiliar. less imposing than Gideon by far, his accent reeking of Core, but that rarely means anything. 

“You dress like New Republic,” Luke sneers through the vocoder. “Am I mistaken?”

“Your eyes don’t deceive you. But we have a higher calling here.” 

Din switches to infrared in his helmet, initially just to look for guards; sure enough, there are a handful in the next room, and another cluster further back, and then, just beyond the next few walls, faint but unmistakable: many, many more.

Far too many. 

He starts to indicate them with his hands, counting them off and mapping them, and as he continues Bo-Katan sucks in a breath of alarm. It's too many to be a personal retinue, too many, even, to be a corporate hire. They'd stepped into a military outpost, and it wasn't New Republic.

He focuses back on the man opposite Luke, and switches to x-ray, which gives him the grainy outline of clothes, general appearances. Medium build, slightly paunchy. He’s wearing an armband over one sleeve of his tunic with a symbol he’s never seen before. 

"I don't think you understand me," the man says, silky. "This is not dangerous for me. This is dangerous for you."

"Why?" Luke asks. It’s strange to see him masked but not cloaked, his helmet pinched and expressionless. He has one hand resting on a slab of carbonite. "Planning to kill me, get the prize for free? Not going to work, I know you need it alive, and right now I can make it dead with the flip of a switch."

"Oh, I assure you, it's nothing to do with me; it's simply that your prize was very high value, but only to a few very select people. One of whom I suspect is very put out at the moment.”

"Sir." A new voice; young, military. Same armband. "Two ships have docked at the main bay. How do you wish to proceed?"

"Ah. Good. I was hoping we could get all of this straightened out quickly. Let them come." A pause. Then, "Give me the child now, and I will perhaps consider hiding you from my true quarry when he arrives. We have much business to discuss, the Mand’alore and I."

Luke hesitates. 

_“Now.”_

Bo-Katan is staring a hole into the side of his helmet. He tries to ignore it, but his outrage is getting harder and harder to swallow down, and he's pretty sure that he's going to throw the plan out the window and do something very stupid in the next couple of minutes.

"Honestly?" Bo-Katan murmurs at his shoulder, nearly startling him, "whatever you're thinking of doing. I'm with you. This cannot be tolerated."

He grits his teeth. He has a singular, terrible, instinctual want. “What would be the best way to flush them all out?” he asks. He sounds strange to himself, even through the vocoder. “Make it impossible to stay, or come back?”

She looks at him, very still, and very calm. “Kill the generators that run the atmo shielding,” she says. “Then strike from orbit. The cruiser isn’t far, I stashed it on the dark side of Concordia.”

He stares at her. “Are you serious?”

“Anything less isn’t going to be enough.”

“Then there’s not going to be anything for you to rebuild.”

“Better that, than some imperial upstarts from Coreward standing on our dead,” she growls.

He shakes his head. “We can do better than that. Let’s...let me try to do better than that.”

“Suddenly you care?” she needles. _“Mand’alore?”_

He ignores her, and tries to think. “See if you can find a console that’s seen recent use. Find out where the forces are concentrated--they’re clearly not occupying the whole city, this is a military outpost but it can’t be a fully functioning town yet. It’ll probably all be close by.”

Bo-Katan nods, if a little peevishly. “And then what?”

“Disable the airlocks around them. Then blow the atmo shielding. They wanted this place; they should breathe its air.”

“That’s going to give us a very tight window to get out of here,” Reeves warns, but she sounds oddly intent. Bo-Katan is straightening too, shoulders settling down and back. 

“What?” Din asks, looking between them.

“A cleansing of the air,” she says. “It is the Way.”

“It is?”

She tilts her head back to look at the ceiling. “Yes, Child of the Watch. It is. If we survive this, I’m giving you some reading.” She checks her gauntlet. “Give us twenty minutes. What are you going to do?”

Din works the kinks out of his neck. Resettles himself. “I guess I’m going to go see what this bastard wants.”

Bo-Katan snorts. “Good luck.” And then she’s off, Reeves in tow. 

Din slams the button on the blast doors. Draws the darksaber and activates it. It hums like a rising tide.

“Heard you wanted to talk to me,” he says, walking in.

Luke has his back to him, and his hands up in surrender. Just beyond him is a man in New Republic robes, a red armband that can’t mean anything good, and a blaster. Four guards immediately raise their blasters, too. 

“That’s close enough,” the man says to Din. “You see what I have.” He waves the blaster in direction of the slab of carbonite. Din swallows, and tries not to look at it.

“I do,” he says. “You have my attention.” 

The man smiles.

"As Mand’alore, I’m sure you’re well acquainted with your people’s history,” he says, raising his chin. He has fussy facial hair and gray streaks in his hair, and has the look of a man who thinks he’s very powerful, and isn’t.

Din waits him out. It’s somewhat amusing to watch him develop a muscular twitch in his cheek as he grows impatient.

Eventually he sniffs and continues. “As such, I’m sure you know that certain factions of us used to have excellent relations with the Mandalorians." 

“‘Us’,” Din repeats.

“Those who believe in order. Who are willing to fight for it.”

“Hm.”

"I'm merely reopening negotiations." 

“Some negotiation,” Luke murmurs. 

Din doesn’t dare look at him. “Uh huh.”

“I’ve been told that Mandalorians appreciate straightforward language,” the man continues, though he’s beginning to look shifty. “So I’ll be brief.”

“Too late,” Luke comments.

“What do you want,” Din asks, inwardly hysterical, “in exchange for the kid?”

“It’s not so much what I want, as what I can give you,” the man says, recovering. “As you can see, we’ve recovered some of what was lost here. With my help, with the New Republic’s help, you could rebuild a home for your countrymen, a place where your foundling can grow up, safe.”

“In exchange for what?” Din repeats.

The man blinks, smiles. “Simply a say in things. I would be happy to serve as a liaison—”

“Oh,” Din cuts in, finally putting it together. “You’re Corr Killian.”

Senator Killian opens his mouth, and no sound comes out. Luke’s shoulders jump with stifled laughter.

"Huh. Not interested," Din says. Over Killian’s spluttering, he finally dares to look at Luke. “He’s got a whole karking battalion here, who the hell is he working with?”

“Haven’t found out yet, but we’ll put it together,” Luke says. 

“You’d better move quick then, because we’re blowing the airlocks.”

“We are?”

“Yeah,” Din growls. “I want these Imps the hell off my planet.”

“Guards!” Killian barks. “Search the premises. And you,” he points his blaster back at Din, “you’re lying, I’ve seen the footage. You would never risk the foundling.”

“You’re right,” Din says. “I wouldn’t. Luke?” 

Luke tilts his head. If he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, Din would see his eyes unfocus as he lifts two fingers and passes them in front of the carbonite. With a strange ripple, like plastisteel warping under blastfire, the delicate, perfect impression of Grogu disappears from the surface of the carbonite, leaving it smooth, empty.

Killian’s face turns the color of magma. “ _Skywalker,_ ” he hisses. “Guards! Kill them!” 

“This was inevitable,” Luke remarks, drawing his lightsaber.

“At least it’s straightforward,” says Din, and opens fire.

When Bo-Katan and Reeves arrive back at the main antechamber, it’s to quite a lot of bodies, and a hissing and spitting Corr Killian backing slowly towards a wall.

“Incoming, Mand’alore,” Bo-Katan yells, skidding around the corner and past the blast doors. “We’ve got half a squadron on our tail and the airlock’s gonna blow in five!”

“Warm or cold, Killian,” Din says, darksaber humming at Killian’s throat. 

“You’re a fool,” Killian snarls. “You’re going to fail your people like every Mand’alore that came before you, devouring your own tail in your lust for meaningless battle—”

“That’s enough of that,” Luke says, and between parries he twitches his free hand, and the carbonite flies across the room to land directly between Killian and the wall. Din lets the darksaber fall to one side as he kicks Killian in the chest and into the slab and punches the control panel. With a strangled shout and a hiss of vapor, he goes cold.

“Right,” Din says. “We should go.”

“Hello again,” Luke says brightly, turning in place and shucking off his bounty hunter helmet, leaving his hair plastered oddly to his head. To Din, it's still a bit like looking directly at a quasar. “Bo-Katan, I take it?”

Bo-Katan glowers at him. “Jedi. I should have known.”

“Two minutes,” Reeves points out. 

“Going, going.”

They pile into their ships, and as the atmo shields begin to cascade into failure, the storms rush in behind them.

“You.” Leia pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m going to need you to repeat that.”

“We broke up some sort of weird ex-Imperial cult,” Luke says, with serene patience. “They’d set up base on Mandalore in one of the old cities. We can go back and retrieve all the evidence once we fix the atmo shields and clear out the sand, provided Din gives his permission.”

“I will,” Din supplies. “But only if Mandalore is given some sort of guarantee that the New Republic isn't taking ownership. A good faith agreement.” Luke had coached Din on that phrase specifically, remarking that it would _drive Leia banthashit._

“You want to negotiate with the New Republic?” Leia says blankly. The holo of her flickers briefly, as if reflecting her shock.

“Maybe, and on some specific terms,” Din says. “Which we’ll need to determine. So you’re going to have to wait a while. I have to make some calls.”

“Oh, some calls. Well.” She throws up her hands. “I guess that’s fine. Not like I actually need Killian’s testimony in Gideon’s case or anything.”

“Do you really need it right this moment?” Luke cajoles. “Gideon’s going to rot on some moon prison for cloning crimes if nothing else, and Killian’s not going anywhere. He’s in carbonite--you can just unfreeze him whenever.”

"Ah yes, that good legal term of _whenever_!" She visibly restrains herself from force-choking her brother from across the galaxy, and Din is a little alarmed that he knows what that looks like now. "Go back to Endor," she advises, though her teeth,"and I will sort this out my own karking way."

This is clearly what Luke had been angling for the whole time, as he now beams at her. "Thanks, Leia."

"You are a scourge of a brother, and I'm ashamed to share genetic material with you," she replies, and ends the transmission.

Din, mostly just glad to have permission to leave, breathes a sigh of relief, and sets a course for Endor.

By the time he arrives, Luke is already there, and Leia is long gone. "Be glad you missed her," he says at the clearing. "The kids are all fine but she's, uh. Displeased."

"Well," Din says. "She's not the only one." 

Bo-Katan had given him a piece of her mind once they’d left orbit, too. 

“I need your word that you’re doing this for Mandalorians,” she had said over the commlink. “Not for your Jedi, and not for your covert. All of us, whether our creed looks like yours or not.”

“That would include Fett, too,” he pointed out, mostly to be contrary, and Reeves’ jaw had flexed. 

Bo-Katan’s nose had flared, but she hadn’t disagreed. “The moment you ally with that Jedi over our people, I’m challenging you for the darksaber.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Din had said, and leapt into hyperspace before she could answer.

Luke hums in sympathy, and they walk back to the temple in silence. Grogu is there to meet them, sitting on Sarkh’s back spines and burbling happily as Sarkh bounces from foot to foot. 

“Lucky again?” Sarkh asks, as he passes Grogu into Din’s arms. Grogu clacks his claws against beskar and coos.

“For now,” Din agrees. 

Leia keeps to her word, and gets things done her own karking way. Gideon is sent to a moon prison and what’s left of his operations on Nevarro is dismantled. An official inquiry into Killian's activities is set into motion, and suddenly a bunch of Senators start quietly resigning.

Mandalore remains untouched as well, as promised. 

Din keeps making plans to head up to the waystation off Tana, and keeps putting them aside. Everything had seemed so clear on Mandalore, but now…

Luke had been right. Endor is safe, and quiet, and Grogu is there. When he leaves, he will leave that, and him, behind.

Grogu starts getting restless. “There’s an inflection point coming,” Luke says, when Din asks him about it. “Many possible futures are spinning out; he’s seeing them shift and form, but there’s no telling which one will be made real yet.”

“What will decide it?”

Luke looks at him, and doesn’t say anything. There are growing shadows under his eyes. They’ve been getting darker ever since they returned from Mandalore.

Din sighs, tired to his bones. 

“What do you need?”

He startles. “What?”

They’re standing awkwardly in the hall between their respective rooms, having walked slowly in that direction after dinner. Din is still holding his bowl of stew, to be consumed once he closes the door behind him. Its heat bleeds through his glove. 

Luke nearly disappears into the darkness of the hall, soft black robes melding with shadowed stone. He looks back at Din, calm and exquisite. “What do you need to decide your path?”

He shakes his head. 

“No one is ever ready for a crown,” Luke says, so gently that it might as well be a scalpel. 

“I don’t know these people,” Din says finally. “I don’t know their ways. They aren’t the Mandalorians I know. And I don’t...how will we fix Mandalore, make it safe to live? If the New Republic helps, how much will we owe it, at the end? Will it cost a tithe, or our independence?”

“I can’t know the answers to those questions,” Luke replies. “Neither can you. But didn’t you say that the Creed is like beskar? Unbreakable, but always able to be reforged. You can reforge it, and reflect in it yourself and all of your people.”

“It’s too big,” Din murmurs. “It’s too damn big. I’m a bounty hunter.”

“With allies on every planet on the Outer Rim.” Luke watches him, very still. “Uniting settlers with Tuskans, Mandalorians with clones.”

Din looks sharply up at him, and he shrugs. “Grogu is so proud of you,” he says, smiling slightly. “Everything you do reminds him of something else you’ve already accomplished, some feat of cleverness or kindness. If he told the galaxy what he tells me every day about you, there would be lines of people signing up to rebuild Mandalore under your care.”

“Luke,” Din chokes, and in two steps he’s there, close, but not touching. 

“What do you need?” he repeats.

“Can we--can I talk to him?”

Luke exhales. “Let’s see what we can do,” he says.

They end up in Din’s room, the three of them. It’s cramped, like most of the rooms in the temple, likely designed for species of slightly smaller stature than modern humanoids, and so they sit on the floor, Din propped up against the ledge that serves as his bed, Luke across from him, their knees almost touching, and Grogu between them, wide-eyed and guileless. 

“There won’t be words, I don’t think,” Luke warns. “We don’t really communicate in them one-to-one, and with a third party in the mix, I expect it will get both muddled and abstract.” He takes a breath. “You might get some feedback from me as well. I...apologize in advance.”

“For what?”

“What you see. If anything bleeds through.” The corners of Luke’s mouth twitch upwards, humorless. 

"It's fine," Din says, unable to think of anything else.

"All right. Just breathe deeply, and concentrate on Grogu. We'll take care of the rest."

Din lets his eyes close. He can smell in the close air the dry, powdery presence of Grogu, faint traces of the stew he'd brought in, and the exhaustion of Luke, soft and lingering with ozone. All of them are breathing in time, long and slow from the belly, heavy with waiting.

When it comes, Din isn't remotely ready.

It creeps up like a spider bite, sharp at first and then slow to take hold. Din experiences an abrupt drop that he feels from his lungs to his toes, followed by a sense memory of running water and desert sun. It lingers just long enough for him to acclimate, and then without warning he is tossed into a maelstrom.

A temple, vast and bright, alive and full of life, rising, rising—

\--terrified shouting—

\--bright silver—

\--burning flesh—

Din clenches his fist as something _severs,_ but then Luke has his hand gripped around his wrist, saying, “Sorry, I’m sorry, it will pass—”

And then,

cool, bright light. 

“Grogu?” he murmurs.

A wash of incandescent joy. A silver ball.

“Hey, kid.” 

He knows it isn’t real, but he can feel an echo of bareness, the touch of small fingers at the edge of his cheek, _it’s time for you to go,_ buir, buir.

 _Tell me what you need,_ he thinks as hard as he can, throwing it out into the ether, willing it to reach. _What can I do that will be best for you?_

Between them, Grogu makes a _rrrrr_ sound, a tremolo of amusement and care. 

“Oh boy,” Luke says, his smile audible.

The answer doesn’t come in words, just like Luke predicted. The images fly by almost too fast for Din to recognize them, but as they accumulate the pattern emerges as clear as the stars in a desert sky. The Tuskens, Mos Eisley, Omera, the destruction of Pershing’s laboratory.

Finally: a wavery view of Bo-Katan on the bridge of the cruiser, looking down at him, jaw clenched. She looks bigger through Grogu’s eyes, a spire of ambition but not, it seems, of malice. 

_“You keep it,”_ she says, and fades away.

Din exhales, shaky. Opens his eyes to find Grogu looking back at him, blinking slow, hands outstretched to him. Unthinking, wrung out, he takes him up in his arms. “Thanks, kid,” he mutters. Grogu burbles, already half-asleep.

“Hey,” Din says to him.

Grogu opens one eye.

“That ever changes, you’ll let me know, right?”

“ _Buir,_ ” Grogu replies, half admonishment. Din guesses that will have to do.

Luke clambers to his feet, and sways as soon as he’s upright. Din steadies him, then pushes him back to sit down on the bed. “Stay there,” he says. “I’m just going to put him to bed.”

“Okay,” Luke says, low and tired. 

Grogu sleeps with the other padawans now, though his hammock is closest to the wall that connects to Din’s quarters. He settles immediately, the sound of the others breathing an easy, steady rhythm, and once he’s out of Din’s arms, Din steps back, watches him from the doorway for a long moment, and then closes the door behind him and returns to his room. 

Luke is sitting where Din put him, slumped over, elbows on knees, hair falling over his eyes. There’s a slight tremble in his hands where they dangle between his calves. Din sits next down next to him, and after a second of silence, starts to slowly remove his armor. 

He can tell the moment Luke notices what he’s doing, because he goes completely still, almost ceasing to breathe. Din tries to focus on the latches of his vambraces, fingers fumbling for the first time in years. He gets frustrated and shucks off his gloves, tugging the left off with his teeth and putting it on the shelf, then reaching for the right. 

Luke, still not looking at him, pivots one hand around to touch his wrist over the glove. “What are you doing?” he asks. He sounds like he’s swallowed sand.

Din isn’t really sure he knows. “I don’t sleep in the armor,” he says, lifting one shoulder. 

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No.”

Luke sucks in a breath and lets it out very slowly. 

Din gets one vambrace loose and slides it off, setting it aside. When he starts on the second, Luke shifts to face him, propping one knee up on the bed, and lifts one hand to his pauldron. “May I?”

Din pauses, surprised and not. Luke is facing the pauldron with the mudhorn on it. Din has to swallow before nodding. “Yeah. Catch on the inside front.” 

Luke curls his fingers under the pauldron and finds the catch, easing it through, then moving down to find the second. His touch is almost clinical, except for the way he skates from one strap to the next, the flats of his fingers along the inside of Din’s bicep. Even through cloth, it feels like being branded. When the pauldron comes free, Luke hands it to him to set aside like he’s handling a crown. 

Less and less steady, Din works through the buckles on his belt, then the chest plate, then thigh guards. Luke watches him, gaze still hazy with exhaustion, but alert enough to dart from Din to the arrangement of beskar at the foot of the bed, and Din knows down to his bones that if he asked, Luke would be able to match the configuration blindfolded, once it was done. 

When he’s down to his helmet and soft clothes, he reaches for Luke’s hand. The far one, still in a thin black glove, that Luke had only used sparingly when touching him. Luke lets him take it, lets him press his thumbs into the meat of its palm. It has very little give. When the fingers twitch, he can feel the mechanism click over at the joints.

“I felt you lose this,” he says, looking down at it.

“My father,” Luke nods. “He cut it off when I first challenged him. The second time, he saved me from the Emperor.”

Din tilts his head at him. “Does that make you think that you and he are even?”

Luke huffs out a laugh. “Maybe. Maybe it’s better not to keep score.”

Din shakes his head, swallowing down his anger.

“I’m not of your Way.” Luke closes his mechanical fingers around Din’s fragile, human ones. “I’d imagine that to you, his crimes are unforgivable. And they are. But the Force is not light or dark alone; it flows through our kindness and our cruelty. It is vast, but it connects us. And in the vastness, small decisions do make a difference. They can themselves be vast. Without my father, the Empire wouldn’t have fallen when it did.”

“This doesn’t feel like a small decision,” Din mutters, even as he tightens his grip around Luke’s hand. 

“It is and it isn’t. Accepting a kingship is big. Deciding to go to the Tana waystation is small. Making a call from there is small. Don’t try to add it up.”

“Seems like a surefire way of pissing your sister off.”

Luke snorts. “You’re not wrong.”

Small decisions. Small actions. Din looks at the pile of beskar, gleaming under the low, single bulb. He’s taken off each piece, one by one, and has felt only lighter with each buckle undone. 

He reaches up with his free hand and takes off his helmet. Turns to look at Luke, unguarded. 

It’s different, in the warm light. The light on the imperial cruiser had washed him out, but here Luke seems limned with gold. With his eyes fixedly downcast, he could be mistaken for the subject of a shrine, the illusion broken only by the firmness of his grip around Din’s hand.

He isn’t looking back. Din wants him to look back. 

He weighs the helmet in his hands. A prickle of realization takes root in his mind; or perhaps it’s been forming all this time. “This is going to mean something different,” he says, turning it, “when I wear it on Mandalore.” He sets it down over the chest plate, between the vambraces. It frees up his hand so he can raise it to Luke’s chin and ease it upwards, until he catches a sliver of blue. 

“Luke,” he starts, but doesn’t quite know how to finish. 

Luke waits, his chest expanding and contracting, gusts of warm breath skating across Din’s hand. 

“Can I...?” Din runs out, helpless, and tips Luke’s mouth towards his. Luke sways towards him, lets himself be angled in until he’s almost flush, and it becomes unbearable, the notion that Din has never truly touched him until now.

Up close, radiant and strange, Luke raises his eyes, and looks at him. 

“Just as I remembered,” he breathes, and he skates one finger, feather-light, up along Din’s temple to brush his hair from his face, curling round the delicate shell of his ear before letting go, and Din shudders and stops him with his mouth, no more choices left.

Armor, spear, and saber. He doesn’t exactly need them on an empty backwater waystation, but this conversation is being recorded, so Luke had advised that he look the part.

“If I can assemble a council of the surviving clans of the Mandalorians, would the New Republic be willing to call a delegation to meet with us?” 

“If they’re not, I’ll make them,” Leia replies, her arms crossed. “Do you know how many will be in this council?”

“At least eight.” That accounts for Bo-Katan and her contingent, a few scraps of House Wren, and Paz, whom he’s only just found camped out on a nameless moon in the Western Regions. 

“Where is the Armorer?” he’d asked, and Paz had just laughed.

“She is where the covert is,” he had answered. “And where the covert is, she is safe.”

“Would she...approve, do you think?” Din had asked, gesturing at the surrounding air.

Paz had tilted his head. “I think the Creed has meant what she’s wanted it to mean for a while now,” he said. “And I think she chose you to fend for our covert for a reason. I have followed her for many years now, sometimes under protest, other times in admiration. I think I speak for both of us when I say that we are interested...very interested...in seeing what you do with all of us now, as our world gets larger than the next hunt.”

“Huh.”

“Don’t worry,” Paz had added. “If I see the need, I’ll challenge you for that sword.”

“Eight is good. I can gather eight delegates who won’t be horrible,” Leia says, thinking aloud. “If there’s more, let me know. More is messier, but can be better, and we have the advantage of a common enemy in the Imperial leftovers on your planet. Is Luke getting involved at all?”

Din looks back over his shoulder at Luke, who is standing at the corner of the comm room, out of range of the holo, arms crossed, staring into the middle distance. Probably talking to Grogu and Dara as they ran around on the surface of Endor. 

“That will be up to the council,” he says. 

“Uh huh,” Leia says, too knowing for Din to be comfortable, and so he signs off as soon as he can get away with it. 

“Does she…?” he starts in mild dread.

“Only the bare outlines,” Luke says, eyes still distant. “It’s hard to avoid, if I’m honest. Joy is infectious between us, kind of literally.” He refocuses, and smiles. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah, for now.” They’ll stay on Endor for a few more days, and then Din has a lead from Cara he needs to follow out near Jakku. He’ll take as long as he has to there, but he knows where he’s returning to after. 

He steps back from the comm station and brushes a gloved hand with Luke’s as they head out the door. Beskar catches the starlight waiting beyond the waystation, and sits easy on his shoulders.

“How do you think the council’s going to go?” Luke asks.

“Terrible,” Din says. “And I’m going to blame it on you.”

“Unfair!” Luke protests, grinning.

“I’m going to blame you,” Din repeats, wringing every inch of happiness he can from Luke’s smile, “And I’m going to blame the Force.”


End file.
